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My health broke down in the end
I don't know when The Magician's Nephew (1955) became my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia. I suspect it's because as unassilable as some of the other books are in their characters and imagery, this is the one that's stranger each time I re-read it. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a solstice ritual, to simplify drastically. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is an odyssey. The Silver Chair is a northern quest. The Magician's Nephew is a weird tale detoured into a creation myth—it begins with a mad scientist in the attic1 reverse-engineering interdimensional travel from the dust of Atlantis, moves swiftly through classic science fiction like dying earths and post-apocalypse and time that runs differently in different worlds (and the place between worlds where there is no time at all) before zigzagging back for a comic interlude in Edwardian London, and then we are into the heart of myth: singing the sun up, the animals out of the earth; the boy who let death in. The first words of the story belong to metafiction, the last to self-delusion, as though to remind the reader never to take narrators for granted.2 And yet we're told of beautiful and terrible things, the dead sun of Charn and the growing silence of the Wood between the Worlds, the song of the stars, the phoenix in the garden, the silver apples of youth and the Witch's salt-white face, eternal life stained like blood around her mouth. Children who rescue their parents, a smuggler's cave in the rafters. Polly Plummer is working on a story. It's not a perfect book; I'm not sure any of the Chronicles are. But it's like nothing except itself, if only because it's such a chimera, and that has always worked very well for me.
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fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.
1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
fleurdelis28 arrives tonight. I think the last time we saw one another in person, there was snow on the ground and a holiday going on. Maybe I should get out more.1. Andrew Ketterley thinks of himself as a magician and is acknowledged as such by the narrator, by Digory, and by the scornful Jadis—"a little, peddling Magician who works by rules and books. There is no real Magic in your blood and heart"—but between his experiments and his exploding guinea pigs, he's much more in line with the traditional mad scientists who practice at the boundaries of alchemy; think of the pentagrams in Rotwang's house or Dr. Pretorius' homunculi. He even looks the part, tall and thin and greyly shock-headed. He has the proper obsessed self-concern. Of course, the mechanical, empirical approach Uncle Andrew takes toward magic gets him in far more trouble than mysticism ever would have. "Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny," meet "Who ever heard of a lion singing?"
2. Lewis-as-storyteller claims, "This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child . . . In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road," setting the timeline for fact with fiction. But it is Uncle Andrew, never really quite reformed, who gets in the last word: "But he always liked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.'"
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Then I have to appreciate at least its existence; the sense of deep time is something Lewis gets right (and the film version of Prince Caspian mostly fumbled . . . That's a different rant).
I have not read any of Lewis' nonfiction—theology, autobiography, essays, letters, zip. Do you recommend any of it? If so, what?
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So, anyway - here are my CSL top picks (and thanks for asking - what a pleasant task!):
The Screwtape Letters - not non-fiction, so I'm cheating from the off, but in case you haven't read it, it comes in the form of letters written by a senior devil to a junior one, giving tips on the best ways to tempt people. Very funny in places, with great insights into human psychology and our capacity for self-deceit
The Discarded Image and Studies in Words - probably just lectures written up, but what lectures! Adventures in the history of ideas and words. Just my cup of tea.
The Problem of Pain - maybe Lewis's most interesting theological book, in which he tries to account for the existence of evil.
A Grief Observed - a raw book, in diary format, written just after his wife died. Nothing smug or complacent here.
Finally, the single piece I've found most useful for my own life is an essay of his called "The Inner Ring" - which I'm delighted to discover is now online!
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Thank you for replying! I have read The Screwtape Letters—I ran into "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" sometime in elementary school and I've never been sure what it did to my brain—but nothing else you name. Next time at the library!
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The "Inner Ring" essay is well worth reading--and highly relevant to That Hideous Strength. I'd also recommend "Membership" and "The Weight of Glory."
The Four Loves is, in places, even more sexist and homophobic than Lewis's other stuff--if that's possible!--and his view of friendship vs. romance makes me want to throw the book against the wall. Despite all that, I recommend it.
And, back in the fiction department, if you don't know Till We Have Faces you should. (IMnsHO of course.)
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I have indeed read it; my first year at Brandeis, I think. It's a version of Cupid and Psyche—how could I not?
Thank you!